Since the changes in Japan citizenship rules and us giving up on buying a house in Japan, we are strongly revisiting the idea of purchasing a home in HK for my mum.
I am in HK for these couple weeks and visited 滙都 now that it’s completely finished.
Unfortunately housing prices has gone up A LOT since I was considering buying in early 2025.
Also unfortunately my prediction of maybe more prices decline did not come true, and went completely the opposite way, with HPI rising from 140 lowest to 160 now.
Here are the two posts from 2 years ago:
Reflection on the decision
Standing where I am now, of course it was kind of “a shame” that we did not buy.
It was HK$3.27M and now market price is at least HK$3.8-4M for the cheapest 1bedroom.
Probably around a 15-20% increase since the lowest. HPI rose by 15% anyway so its around there.
Meanwhile gold and crypto both went through a bear year. Stocks are okay but the ones I hold is basically just flat anyway.
While HK property went up that much, was completely unexpected.
Was the decision at the moment correct?
However looking at the time though I guess the decision was correct at that moment.
The main points of consideration were these:
1. possibility of further decline – that wasn’t really the part I was concerned with the most though and I knew it was possible that it was the lowest.
2. possibility of rate hikes in the future – that is actually coming true now although after 2 years and a huge increase in the HPI. HK property market hasn’t cooled due to that though, it will need to be a persistent hike cycle to make that happen I guess, which is not a guarantee at this point at all.
3. Wanting to buy in Japan – I guess this was the biggest factor. I factored in a 80-90% chance of citizenship application success, and if that were to have gone through (probably by now or within a few months), then I could have bought. Therefore I did not want to tie up the capital in HK and have a monthly payment burden, and also possibly having that loan reduce the mortgage I can get in Japan (although I don’t know if it’s connected or not)
4. Thinking if HK property market went up, it would probably be a rate-cut cycle and monetary expansion cycle that would lift all boats – that was actually kind of true and gold hit ATH of $5500 early 2026, and BTC hit ATH of $125k late 2025. I did make a lot of money in investment in 2025. However probably because of the Iran war and rate hike expectations, investments has taken a huge hit; meanwhile HK property market is staying strong (maybe because of a lag???)
To summarize, I think the decision in early 2025 was mostly correct. Although buying would have definitely been a good choice too considering the risks, which is why I did almost pull the trigger.
But there were a lot of risks and other concerns and somehow for the most part every factor worked against my actual decision of not buying, thats why it would look like a “bad decision” in retrospect.
Moving forward
So at this point, because I’ve for now given up purchasing in Japan, I am going to want to buy the HK home as soon as possible.
With that said though, there has been pretty big investment losses this year, and I think both gold and BTC is probably at their lows – at least definitely on-sale accumulation zone rather than profit-taking euphoric zone.
Therefore ideally I would wait until the next highs for at least BTC, hopefully gold as well, before I do profit-taking and move the capital to deploy into the home.
With the recent HK property price increase though I do have some FOMO feeling to be honest. What if it goes up another 10-20% from here in the next 2-3 years?
I am writing this post to make sure I am being patient.
In any case there are no suitable units for sale in 滙都 for now anyway. There was 1 good unit selling for 4.4M though. I am looking at 3.8M as my baseline for now, and 4M at the max.
With gold and BTC both down in the dumpster, let’s wait for the 3.8M miracle for now and don’t settle.
If BTC and/or gold reclaim ATHs then I think it would be okay to pay 4-4.2M – also of course depending on the HPI by then.